


Prizes

by Merfilly



Category: DCU - Comicverse
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-16
Updated: 2008-01-16
Packaged: 2017-10-28 21:57:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/312593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merfilly/pseuds/Merfilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world where the Battle of Metropolis belongs to the villains, Slade had motives for taking a hero alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prizes

The battle sounds had faded to a muted whimper, Slade noted. He could see the victory sinking in...and knew the fracturing of this thing he'd helped build would not be far behind. The heroes had stopped the world-building tower, but it hadn't been enough to keep them from falling to the Society.

He stared bitterly at the broken thing that had once been Dick Grayson. Idly, the words he'd promised to etch on his gravestone, so many years ago, came to mind.

Stupid kid. Stopping the blast hadn't done more than delay the inevitable. The Bat was too dangerous an opponent to let live. If only the Kid had...

Had what? Submitted to him? Pleaded for mercy? He scoffed at both thoughts, but the bitter anger was too hard to swallow. It needed, demanded release, a target for the way losing the Kid was making him question the path he was on.

He heard a commotion, saw as Dr. Light was thrown over the body of his female counterpart. Slade's mouth tightened; so the foolish little bird still lived and tried to fight?

He crossed the ruins of battle without thought to the bodies, the blood. His one eye focused, still a little blurred, on his new target. She turned, injured and bloody herself, but ready to defy him, even as she always had in their run-ins.

"Stand down, Canary...and you might live yet," he told her, his voice a roiling wave of violence and seduction.

"Go to..." She got no further, his speed even in this state too much for her to counter.

"Sister, that's exactly where you live now," he told her unconscious body. With luck, she'd know something about where the Kid had hidden his daughter. If not...she still had to pay for nearly taking his good eye.

* * *

Slade quickly learned Dinah had no idea where Rose was, but that did not end his interest in keeping her. Dinah lived day to day in fear of just what would happen once the Society's upheavals and division of the world settled. She fought down the images of her kinfolk, her comrades, her peers struck down in the Battle, and prayed for the strength to find a way free before he focused solely on her. Just like all the other prayers, that one went unanswered, as Slade finally moved her to one of his larger homes, and made her his new distraction from immortality.

He was too urbane to go for outright physical torture, though the fear of it lingered in her mind, remembering another Army vet with a fondness for sharp objects. He did, however, seem to enjoy taking her into the gym, with it locked and barred from her getting out. He had found a collar to replace the choker she had worn for so long; this one, rather than keeping her in touch with Oracle, was designed to still the deadly vibrations of her Cry. With it in place, he would goad her into fighting, punishing her body with 'training', until she could not stand any longer.

At all other times, he simply left her alone. Completely, totally isolated from all contact, all sense of time, all distractions. Meals were delivered at random intervals, sleep was interrupted as unpredictably. The only human being Dinah ever saw was Deathstroke. Never Slade. Never the man that had worked with her against gorillas, dinosaurs, and the Japanese.

Always the cold-blooded mercenary that had ordered a nuclear strike on Bludhaven. The man that had murdered Phantom Lady right in front of Damage. The man who she had come so close to beating, and who now taunted her with her inability to do so again. Try and try, every time he took her in there, and every time, she failed. She listened to him catalog just how and where she had done so, from the beginning of each fight.

The failures added up, in the quiet, mind-numbing aloneness of her prison. She found herself running over the fights, repeating them, seeing the holes, the gaps.

She got better. She could last longer. She could even throw him, at least once, each time, even if it meant she paid with a heavier bruise from his next blow. 

The first time he complimented her, she froze, torn by the fact he had, and that it was him...her captor, her abuser.

She firmly told her mind to not give in to his tactics. To not let her isolation tear her apart.

If she held on, someone would rescue her, or she would get good enough to kill him and escape.

She promised herself that, even though she found herself craving the trips into the gym. The contact, brutal as it was, with another human being. The sound of a voice that was not her desperate, whispered crying.

She just had to endure, and find a way to take the solace in being alone, before he broke her to his molding.

* * *

She stared down, uncomprehending at first of what she'd done. It did not match the pattern of the life she had led for innumerable days. He was down, not moving, not reacting with a heavier blow, a taunt about how she belonged to him, that he would make her the perfect tool for his purposes.

He didn't move. He hadn't moved since he fell, from when her hand snapped up into his nose. He hadn't seen the blow. She'd finally learned to block the tells, and he missed it. Then he fell.

Her brain could not process the thought.

Her only contact was dead, because he had shaped her into the perfect tool.

For his purposes.

To escape the endless deaths, to free himself from the loss of his own humanity, he had shaped her to fight him and win.

It left her free to escape.

She just had to realize what freedom was again.


End file.
